* Crucially, everything that ran on steam power was in trouble. Professor Lovell, it turned out, had made the majority of his fortune by turning steam power from a fussy and complicated technology to a reliable source of energy that powered nearly the whole of the British fleet. His great innovation had actually been quite simple: in Chinese, the character for vapour was 气 (qì), which also bore connotations of spirit and energy. When installed on the engines devised by Richard Trevithick some decades earlier, it produced a shocking amount of energy at a fraction of the cost in coal. (Researchers in the 1830s had explored applications of this match-pair in aerial transportation, but they hadn’t got very far as the balloons kept either exploding or shooting into the stratosphere.)
This single invention, some argued, explained Britain’s victory at Trafalgar. Now all of England ran on steam. Steam locomotives had displaced many horse-drawn vehicles; steam-engine ships had mostly displaced sails. But Britain had very few Chinese translators indeed, and, with the exception of Robin and Professor Chakravarti, all the other translators were, unhelpfully, dead or abroad. Without scheduled maintenance, steam power would not fail to work entirely, but it would lose its unique power; it’s incredible efficiency that put British ships in a league beyond anything the American or Spanish fleets could achieve.
* The Baresch alphabet used on the resonance rods, for instance, is not strictly necessary to their function; it was created by Babel scholars solely so that its proprietary resonance technology would remain inscrutable to outsiders. It is astounding, in truth, how much of academia’s perceived resource scarcity is artificially constructed.
* Abel brought them a running stream of gruesome updates. On the Cherwell, a houseboat collided with a transport barge when the navigation systems of both failed, causing a steaming pile-up in the middle of the river. Three people died, trapped in submerged cabins. Up in Jericho, a four-year-old child was crushed under the wheels of a carriage which ran amok. Out in Kensington, a seventeen-year-old girl and her lover were buried alive when the ruins of a church tower collapsed above them during a midnight tryst.
* On a Wednesday, two carts collided, one of which was loaded with barrels of fine brandy. When the sweet fumes leaked out onto the street, a small crowd of bystanders rushed in to scoop up the brandy with their hands, and it was all good fun until a man with a lit pipe walked into the fray, turning the street into a conflagration of people, horses, and exploding barrels.
* The papers always referred to the strikers as foreign; as Chinamen, Indians, Arabs, and Africans. (Never mind Professor Craft.) They were never Oxfordians, they were never Englishmen, they were travellers from abroad who had taken advantage of Oxford’s good graces, and who now held the nation hostage. Babel had become synonymous with foreign, and this was very strange, because before this, the Royal Institute of Translation had always been regarded as a national treasure, a quintessentially English institution.
But then England, and the English language, had always been more indebted to the poor, the lowly, and the foreign than it cared to admit. The word vernacular came from the Latin verna, meaning ‘house slave’; this emphasized the nativeness, the domesticity of the vernacular language. But the root verna also indicated the lowly origins of the language spoken by the powerful; the terms and phrases invented by slaves, labourers, beggars, and criminals – the vulgar cants, as it were – had infiltrated English until they became proper. And the English vernacular could not properly be called domestic either, because English etymology had roots all over the world. Almanacs and algebra came from Arabic; pyjamas from Sanskrit, ketchup from Chinese, and paddies from Malay. It was only when elite England’s way of life was threatened that the true English, whoever they were, attempted to excise all that had made them.
* ‘Let them hate, so long as they fear.’
* But that was part of the genius of Babel. By keeping them isolated, by distracting them with coursework so that they never had the chance to form bonds outside their cohort, it had cut off all avenues towards meaningful solidarity, had made them believe for so long that they were the only ones caught in their particular web.
*
* The Peterloo Massacre of 1819, the largest immediate effect of which was to provoke a government crackdown on radical organizing. The cavalry rushed a crowd agitating for parliamentary representation, crushing men, women, and children alike under their hooves. Eleven died.
* ‘Arm’d with thy sad last gift – the pow’r to die! / Thy shafts, stern fortune, now I can defy.’ (Thomas Day and John Bicknell, 1775)
* In (the white Englishwoman) Aphra Behn’s 1688 romantic novel Oroonoko, the African prince Oroonoko kills his lover Imoinda to save her from being violated by the English military forces against whom they are revolting. Oroonoko is later captured, bound to a post, quartered, and dismembered. Oroonoko, and its theatrical adaptation by Thomas Southerne, were received at the time as a great romance.
* ‘With one hand he will make an open path for freedom.’
* ‘Thus, thus it helps to go beneath the shadows.’